PC hangs on shut down, but not all the time

I guess I could give that a try. I might keep a log of what processes are running when my PC shuts off fine and what are running when it isn't. May help me get to the bottom of this.

It's still odd though how I can use it for hours and it shut off fine.

I don't think it's a process. I turned my PC off this morning as a test and it was fine and made sure to take a screenshot of all the processes that were running before the successful shutdown and did the same just now before an unsuccessful shutdown. The processes that were running were identical.

Something keeps it awake? Checked all the "wake on" settings?

The problem isn't that it wakes on its own in sleep but rather that it doesn't shut down.

I did however take a look through the other settings and USB selective suspend was enabled. Apparently people have had shutdown problems with that. I also lowered the minimum processor state from 100% to 10%. Don't know if that's got anything to do with it though.

hey Worked perfectly for me . Thanks for helps !!

Hi Barbara, I'd be interested to know what your problem was and what the solution was?

Yeah, around then. How would I go about uninstalling them? As for system restore, I've never used it before but if I did use it what would be affected?

But would the update really cause this to happen only some of the time? The whole thing's just odd because it only seems to happen if the PC has been on for a long time (e.g. 12+ hours), and even then it doesn't seem to happen if most of that time has been spent in sleep mode.

Run a pass of sfc.
Run a pass of chkdsk with the repair bad sectors option.
If this is a desktop take the side panel off.

Just did both of these. sfc did bring up something corrupt which was fixed. Not sure what the results of chkdsk were as I was out of the room doing something else while it was running.

Taking the side panel off isn't really practical for me not just because of the PC's location but also because as I said, this problem only seems to happen when the PC's been in for a long time. It's so frustrating because it means I basically get one shot a day at testing stuff out. Any other times I try and turn it off it's fine.

The chkdsk results are in the event viewer.
How hard can it be to remove the side panel?
You try stuff and find out what it's not.

so I wonder if you have some USB external drive that's attached. Some of these have been known to cause odd startup and shutdown problems. Some will also spin down when not in use or if a USB port goes into some power saving mode. Personally, I gave up on hibernation and sleep modes long ago. Of course this was with laptops and not PCs but I do wonder if enabling sleep mode is related to your issue. You might try turning that feature off for a while just to see if it changes anything.

I don't use sleep mode very often - I was just making the point that the PC has problems shutting down when it's been on all day but seemingly not if it's been in sleep mode for most of the day.

I do have an external HDD attached so I might try turning that off before I turn my PC off and see what happens.

I'm not sure if my PC can be turned off by holding the power button? I've never tried it before.

I really hope it's not a hardware problem. I only got this PC a few months ago. But surely if it was a hardware problem it wouldn't shut off at all? As I said, it shuts off fine some of the time.

When the hardware has failed. This makes it one of many hardware tests I do today.

These are in your BIOS but I can't direct you as to where. There should be one that allows options when the button is pressed such as power down immediately or wait 4 seconds. As well, there should be one that tells the PC whether to restart after a power failure or remain shut down. You'll have to search for these by entering the BIOS when starting the PC. It's usually a function key or the delete button. The key needed might be briefly displayed on your monitor during POST.

No idea - why that one in particular?

that one file caused a lot of problems. An older game would get installed on a newer OS than it was issued for, then things would go wrong because the game replaced the updated version of the file. The fix often was to put the older file into the same folder as the game, since it always looks first in it's own folder before following a generic system path, so the game would play correctly and then replacing the current file into the system folder or whichever it's placed into now. You mentioned the game seemed to be the cause of your problem and that old memory came up.

Ah ok.

I think it might have something to do with the graphics card. I've played this game with the same OS on previous PCs fine. Also, one of the textures in the game doesn't show up properly. It's a very minor point but could be related.

Not that I'm that bothered - I'd rather have a problem with my PC not being able to play this one game than have something wrong with the hardware.

Does Hibernate work around this one?

What do you mean exactly?

I sometimes forget folk don't know. Here's the howto.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/7564/how-to-manage-hibernate-mode-in-windows-7/

No I know what hibernate is, you just didn't give much detail. "Does hibernate work around this one" is pretty vague. What did you mean by that exactly?

Try hibernate instead of shut down.